Please join us for the NYC launch of Tamizdat Project's first book and a bilingual reading of Abram Tertz's PKHENTZ by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky!
This iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation relates the miseries of a mid-level Soviet accountant—pseudonym Andrei Sushinsky—who is actually an outer-space alien. A classic misunderstood hero, he struggles daily to keep himself alive (his cactus-like body requires abundant water and has been debilitated by years of concealment) and to avoid the constant threat of exposure. Repulsed by the gross physiology and petty concerns of his Soviet neighbors and fellow-citizens, Sushinsky dreams of reuniting with his lost planet and treasures the faint traces of it that remain: scraps of his long-lost language (hence the title word PKHENTZ, a barely remembered sacred name) and his own extravagantly nonhuman body. Meanwhile, years of life among humans and concerted efforts to assimilate have worn Sushinsky down and caused him to question his sense of reality and existence overall.
Written in 1957, the story was first published in the West in the wake of the infamous Moscow show trial of 1966, when two Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Tertz) and Yuly Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak) were sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years of hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works abroad. While ostensibly addressing the experience of living with various covert identities in the mid-century Soviet Union (Jewish, dissident, political prisoner), the story’s subsequent wanderings broaden its purview to include refugee, émigré and queer experience. This inaugural publication presents the story for the first time as a freestanding edition and in a new English translation.
Ainsley Morse is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature from the former USSR and its many republics, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as the former Yugoslavia and present day Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. She is the author of Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (2021) and a translator from Russian, B/C/S and Ukrainian. Her co-translated volume Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film (by Yuri Tynianov) won the 2021 AATSEEL Best Scholarly Translation award. She is also a coeditor (with Anastasia Osipova) at Cicada Press, a small independent publisher of translated poetry.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet, translator and professor at NYU. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, were published in the NYRB Poets series. His translations include Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think and The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, among others.